CT Culture Corner: 'The Gold' was inspired by a famous heist, CT also has notable thefts

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If you like “Downton Abbey,” one of its stars, Hugh Bonneville, has a new Masterpiece Theater series out: “The Gold,” now streaming on PBS.

Heists are much in the news today, given the “Pink Panther” like fiasco at the Louvre last month. Determining precisely which gold heist was the world’s biggest is surprisingly tricky. Do you count the 16th and 17th century by the Spanish looting of the Americas, when conquistadors took vast amounts of gold from the Aztec and Inca civilizations?  How about the Nazis theft of gold and valuables from governments and central banks of those nations they conquered to fund their war efforts? People have been stealing gold since those in the Sumerian civilization discovered it made jewelry and headdresses look really smashing 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia.

But in British history, few gold thefts loomed as large or as seismically as the “Brink’s-Mat Robbery” of Nov. 26, 1983 which is the inspiration behind “The Gold.” Part of the interest comes from the enormity of the crime, when six armed men broke into the Brink’s-Mat security depot near London’s Heathrow Airport, and stumbled across gold bullion worth £26 million. The South London robbers were looking for foreign currency, but instead found 6,800 bars of gold bullion. The question was not whether to steal it, but what to do once they had it, which forms the crux of this international thriller about money laundering, greed and the class system in Britain.

At the time of the Brinks-Mat robbery, gold was selling at $449.50 per troy ounce, the gold was worth about $33 million in 1983. Recently, gold just hit $4,000 an ounce. Three tons of gold at that rate would be just under $400 million.

“The Gold” is streaming on PBS Passport.

Trivia question

Gold, like other precious metals and gems, is measured per troy ounce. What is a troy ounce and why do we use that term?

Connecticut’s restless author

Many people hunt for gold, while others hunt for…snow leopards, or inner peace, or a combination of the two.

Connecticut-born Peter Matthiessen, the American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher and onetime CIA agent, is the subject of a new biography “True Nature,” by Lane Richardson. Best known for books like “The Snow Leopard,” an account of his  250-mile wildlife trek across the Himalayas to find a cure for his own “deep restlessness,” he became the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction and fiction.

A graduate of the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville and Yale University, in 1953, Matthiessen, Harold L. Humes and George Plimpton co-founded The Paris Review in Paris, with the goal of publishing creative literary works.

The writer and naturalist owned a home in the Litchfield Hills and on Fisher’s Island, N.Y. He died in 2014.

Connecticut’s heists

You don’t have to look to the Louvre for celebrated heists, Connecticut has plenty of its own, including the 2020 Eli Lilly pharmaceutical heist in which the FBI reported thieves made off with $60 million worth of pharmaceuticals-the largest theft in the state’s history, and the Águila Blanca robbery, which took place Sept. 12, 1983, when more than $7 million was stolen from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford. In both instances, perpetrators were caught and prosecuted, according to the FBI.

Trivia answer

A “troy ounce” is so believed to have derived from the town of Troyes in France, which in the Middle Ages was a trading hub for Europe and Britain. Merchants needed a standardized, accurate system for weighing valuable goods like gold and silver. It was first used in England in the 15th century.

This article originally published at CT Culture Corner: ‘The Gold’ was inspired by a famous heist, CT also has notable thefts.